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This study set out to address the question of digital scholarly publishing in the broad context of socio-institutional and historical construction. The purpose of the study is therefore to show that the 'Gutenberg revolution' has not yet been attained for digital scholarly publishing because of the environmental subjectivities of society, political economy and discourse that deconstruct its trajectory of innovative disruption. The main methods deployed were the social shaping of technology and the embeddedness paradigms. They enable the study to move beyond narrow, technological readings to scrutinize broader sociological implications for cyberspace publishing. Consequently, it found out that since the 1980s, digitization has only changed the process of scientific communication but has hardly made a significant dent on the substance of academic communication. It is very prone to risks from the 'square peg' and 'horseless carriage' models of understanding its progression. The tendency now is for digital publishing to take the direction of concentration and restrictions and because of the embeddedness of the digital in the social and the discursive contexts; its growth is deeply contingent upon historical and contemporary institutional structures

This paper employed postcolonial insights from Jeremy Weate and critical discourse analysis to argue that ecommerce is a complex metanarrative that has the potential to emancipate mankind; however, it is susceptible to discourses of joblessness, discrimination and lawlessness. These discourses impacted negatively on the political economies of developing countries and justified state interventionism in these countries. But state interventionism has shown its limitations in the development of African countries. Therefore, the state may be appropriated by the nation to realize development in these countries, until the time when the nation can realize development on its own. At any rate, as literature of the continent show, the state and the nation have now become shifting narratives at the service of digital capital

This paper set out to rethink digital networking as a strategic discourse from which to expand the prospects of a critical model of cultural studies in ICT marketing consultancy. Drawing insights from critical theory and starting from the premise that the digital network strategy is not inclusive enough of businesses, communities and individuals, as it ought to be, the paper proposes a new 'literary' and cultural model that incorporates the media of the commons, political engagement, upliftment of societal standards of living, brand culture and language appropriation. It illustrates this critical 'literary' and cultural model by drawing from network platforms like Linkedin, Myspace, Facebook, Youtube Twitter, blogging, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, Podcasting, Snapchat Tumblr, Blog spot, and Wordpress. In order to re-embed the postcolonial 'literary' context in digital networking and show the perspectives of the network platform as a potentially emancipative metanarrative, it takes inspiration from case examples of studies of democracy in the Arab spring, electoral politics in African countries like Zimbabwe and Kenya, the Mexican food chain Chipotle, the film industry and companies like Apple.

This paper advances the hypothesis that big data analytics has an enormous value that can be utilized not only for various purposes like decision making for political gains and market profit but also for the creation of a database for literary studies and ethnicity/cultural preservation. However, it maintains that the coding methodology in the general application of big data analytics to industry and business is not configured in the same way as in the conservation of culture. While machines can perform certain tasks more efficiently than humans, machines cannot effectively handle the humanistic environments of projects like software archiving of continental oral literature. Consequently, the 'traditional way' of doing things that have survived and is still active based on the coding methodology in computerization of big data should be adapted in the future in order to efficiently handle the tacit components of big data in oral literary archiving. It argues that the software digitization model needs to be very sensitive to the implicit contexts of application in the oral continental discourse, by handling not only the 'correlative' but also the 'causative' in the continuum where 'code' meets with the discursivity of the environment

This paper set out to trace out a number of pathways to address the problem of adopting and diffusing e-voting as a new global model of electoral democracy through an IT project management model. The paper found out that e-voting was beset by numerous challenges. Using data from selected western countries and oral poetry from Somalia, and drawing from the advocacy coalition framework of e-voting, it comes to the conclusion that continental literature and data can be very useful sources of insights for a critical approach to e-voting. The model suggested is not simply a variation of traditional project management that can address the problem of susceptibility to multiple factors such as social division, the erosion of community solidarity and trust, conflict of views between stakeholding coalitions leading to non-adoption of e-voting at national level and relative adoption at sub-national level, the predominance of emotions and fears between coalition groups over substantive issues, risks at different levels of procedure, and informational, financial and institutional constraints of and pressures on e-policy makers.

Digital and sensory marketing is often presented as an essentialism in itself with the potential to construct results in global consumption culture. However, this paper argues that this model of marketing is very complex because it is embedded in the dynamics of history and symbolism. Digital and sensory marketing is not constructed in a vacuum, but by generations of people who challenge orthodox views of consumption and forge their own idiosyncratic visions of marketing, which the business and corporate world soon adopt. Products and services do not have inherent properties of their own but rather draw their signification from consumption culture. The generations that drive consumption have their own attitudes and sense of selffulfillment that eventually determine the branding experience. ICTs have a critical role to play in moulding this changing culture. However, there are certain risks that the shifts in the value of global consumption culture may bring, particularly when it comes to new ethical questions such as how to control privacy, intrusion and the utilization of big data

Drawing from Bruno Latour's amodernist organization theory, which illuminates the canonization of epistemological boundaries in the field of project management studies, this paper argues that Homi Bhabha's emancipative project in postcolonial research, has failed to assert itself in this globalizing age of projectification of societies. In its historiographical context incarnated in writings by management scholars, the field of project management orientalized Africa as underdeveloped and in need of occidentalist modernization. This Latourian insight driven by the quest for the 'purified canon' portraying the metropole as 'centre' of civilization and the colonies/Africa, as the Other, was tragically misjudged by nationalist ideologues fighting for independence, post-independence leaderships in Africa, who met in the Bandung Conference, advocates of a New World Economic Order, pan-Africanists, because their interventions were grounded chiefly in hybridization. But hybdization means the demise of the amodern and since the occident will not stand by to witness this decanonization with an applause, the Third World was already 'mal parti' (to cite Denan) because its post-independence leadership needlessly staged the post-colonial project on the path of a hybridization logic of inevitable confrontation rather than in a light of participation and solidarity. Hybridization in post-colonial management studies connotes with the inevitability of 'confrontation' at a time when the Third World does not have the means to deal efficiently with it. Hybridization can also mean 'participation' and 'solidarity' (in the sense of understanding the Other's viewpoint and embedding it) without radiating the perception of threat and taking no responsibility or showing any competence to deal with the consequences of that perception.
It concludes that, instead of 'playing' the ideological game at the level of the 'super-structures', more emphasis should be placed on building greater competency in the Latourian amodernism of development, entrepreneurship, etc. The Third World needs to build more projects by investing in the knowledge industry of amodernism while incorporating its cultural values. The West and the emerging world should not see this as a 'threat' to amodernism but as a 'richness'; but for this to happen, they should actively invest in sustainability of this process by supporting the intelligentsia of knowledge producers and interpreters in the Third World.

This paper is premised on the hypothesis that gamification is a digital metanarrative that is very susceptible to the sociological discourses of political economy. Drawing insights from the critical paradigms of David Berry's (2014) critical theory in digital capitalism, Thomas Allmer's (2015) critical theory and social media: between emancipation and commodification and Hamilton, Bodle and Korin's Explorations in critical studies of advertising, intersecting client culture and market technology, it argues that gamification's rationalist assumptions have severe limitations when it comes to investigating digital marketing in context because it interfaces with the critical narratives of the online customer in ways which are complex. These critical customer narratives have to do with crowdsourcing, new habits and addictions of the online customer, cognitive/affective behaviourism, emotional branding, and deconstructive problems of consumer trust that relate to ethics, law and cyber security of data use.

This paper on digital economy, the diaspora and ideological crisis argues that ICTs in the context of the political economy of trans-nationalism and globalization are a very powerful machinery taking on new shapes, concerns and directions and with potential to subvert any narrations of nation states, home, roots or other forms of organization. Exploiting the tools and techniques of the cyberspace, with the uses to which they are put to promote capital (e-business, e-commerce, e-marketing, etc), the paper maintains that the technology intersects with and neutralizes concerns over civilization, identity, political image, ethnicity, religion, law, and so forth. The digital diaspora is therefore a formidable project which is ongoing at a greater pace than before; however, this pace is undecidable, unpredictable and irreducible to any given region, nation or community. Drawing insights from Stanley Fish's critical theory of interpretive communities, it argues that digitization of the economy and the diaspora are narrowly fueled by the determinism of capital and ICT technologies; therefore, it is necessary to consider that there are always new forms of civilizational foundationalism that have the potential to resist the cyberspace of 'origin', from the perspectives of narratives of place, time, identity, etc, and are now re-asserting themselves in different ways and by re-engaging alternatively with the digital technologies of transnationalism and globalization and in a manner that was never predictable. The new identitarian ideologies emerging from the digital economy and diasporization of 'homes' have to do with the culture of being 'cool', construction of new political awareness leading to dissensions, the talking-back website culture, lesbian and gay pride identities, post nation state identities, creation of transnational and multilinguistic 'masses', construction of pornography diasporic communities, communities of popular resentment and economic disruption, of self-organization , ofdigital youth branding;, ...

Using a critical review of selected works on Africa by prominent African intellectuals, this interdisciplinary study concludes that, contrary to Amartya Sen's theory about the "real freedoms" that people enjoy in democratic states, these freedoms cannot be realized in Africa, because the continent's mode of capitalism is dependent upon international finance. This system cannot function as an autonomous structure and has engendered major political contradictions in the continent's nation-states. The capitalist ruling elites have hindered the expansion of full democratic rights in Africa by encouraging and exploiting the politics of class division. The African experience with liberal democracy indicates that Sen's theory of development and "real freedoms" fails to take into account these contradictions as well as the religious and cultural idioms in Africa that run counter to liberal conceptions of emancipation. Achieving democracy and freedom in Africa is not merely a question of capacity building, it involves resolving difficult issues of power – particularly, in class and gender relations. The essay concludes by suggesting that there needs to be a shift away from conceptualizing development in terms of only economic factors to a new approach which combines more enlightened neoliberal capitalism with new indigenous strategies of development.